January 14, 2019

We marketing people have a dreadful habit of taking the obvious and making it incomprehensible. So today I would like to go against the grain and take the obvious and make it more obvious.

If you are someone who has to make decisions about how to spend marketing dollars, here are some principles I believe in for simplifying and clarifying your thinking.

The first thing we have to understand about marketing communication is that there are no absolutes. There are just likelihoods and probabilities. When making communication decisions, our job is to assess likelihoods and
probabilities. In other words, precision guessing. We need to reckon which of the many alternatives we are faced with has the highest probability of producing the result we are looking for with the budget we have.

A second principle is to understand the limits of what we do. We don't have as much power to
create business greatness as we think we do. There are too many important
aspects of business success that are out of our control. We don't
control the product; we don't control the pricing; we don't control the
distribution; we don't control the employees -- we only control the message. We have to be realistic about
the limits of what the message can impart to a poorly made,
badly designed, overpriced, hard-to-find, product. Or a product that has any one of those characteristics.

Third is perhaps the most obvious. But it is the big secret that is hidden in plain sight. Brands that are in the spotlight
have a much higher likelihood of being successful than brands that are
not in the spotlight. This is where we have leverage. For this reason alone all marketing communication should have a common objective -- to find a piece of the spotlight.

This is also one of the reasons that our industry's current obsession with precision targeted, one-to-one advertising is misguided. Precision targeting may be valuable for direct response. But history shows us that direct response strategies have a very low likelihood of producing major consumer facing brands. Building a big brand requires widespread attention. Precision targeted, one-to-one communication has a low likelihood of delivering widespread attention (see this from last week.)

The
spotlight is not a guarantee of success, but it creates a much higher
likelihood of success. It is a simple calculation: you are more likely to be
more successful if you are more famous and more visible. You may not like this
calculation or approve of its ramifications, but it should be
self-evident to anyone who wants to look at marketing with a clear
eye. Do you think Donald Trump would be President if The Apprentice had been a webinar?

There are many ways to attempt to find the spotlight. Some
brands find it naturally because the media fall in love with them. Tesla
is a perfect example. So are Amazon, Google and Uber. The amount of free spotlight these companies have enjoyed because of press attention is incalculable.

These brands make achieving high visibility seem easy. It is anything but.

Sadly, you have a very low
probability of being a Tesla, an Amazon, a Google, or an Uber. Maybe one in 10,000 brands are that
interesting. The belief that you can use one of these companies as a model for your communication strategy is a delusion. It has a minuscule probability of happening for you. Most of us have to think or buy our way into the
spotlight.

Finding the spotlight can be attempted in a number
of ways. There is no "right way." You can do it with PR, you can do it
with social media, you can do it with advertising. Your job is to find the most likely strategy for getting a piece of the spotlight at a price you can afford.

Once you decide on your strategy, there is one other principle you must employ. There is nothing that creates a greater likelihood of attaining high visibility than creativity. The probability of your efforts shining a light on your brand is enormously higher if you have a imaginative idea behind it. I will say it again - regardless of what communication or media strategy you employ, there is nothing more likely to garner you a piece of the spotlight than a great creative idea.

So let's recap:

- Your most under-acknowledged job is assessing likelihoods and probabilities.
- You must be realistic about the power of marketing communication.
- One of the most essential characteristics of a successful brand is high visibility.
- One of your strategic imperatives is to produce fame and visibility by garnering a piece of the spotlight.
- Achieving a place in the spotlight is extremely difficult.
- You are more likely to attain the spotlight by being widely seen rather than narrowly focused.
- Splitting hairs over words in briefing documents is largely a waste of time. Most of the distinctions you draw between your brand and your competitors' are lost on consumers. A much more productive discussion is, "Which strategy or execution is most distinctive and has the highest probability of making us famous?" In the long run, the strategy with the most value for your brand is the one that is most likely to buy you high visibility.
- A key question you must answer is whether you have the assets to achieve a piece of the spotlight? The assets that have the highest probability of garnering that are money and creativity. There is rarely enough money.

As a simple-minded guy, all of this seems perfectly obvious to me. However, our industry appears to be in such a state of confusion that the obvious is no longer credible.

Please do not send me your favorite example of a big brand that was built outside the lines of these principles. Of course there are some. There are no rules. Just likelihoods and probabilities.

January 07, 2019

One of the questions I’ve been wrestling with for years is why online advertising seems to be incapable of building major consumer-facing brands.

We’ve had 20 years of phenomenal growth of online advertising and yet I have trouble coming up with one example of a major consumer-facing physical brand that was built by online advertising. I can think of no examples of major brands of beer, soda, cars, toothpaste, paper towels, candy bars, soap, fast food, peanut butter — you get the picture — that were built by online advertising.

After 20 years of existence radio and TV had built hundreds - if not thousands - of consumer brands.

There are some who would argue that there are very big web-native brands that have been built by online advertising - e.g., Amazon, Google, and Facebook. I’m not so sure that advertising played a major role in the building of any of those brands, but let’s leave that argument for another day and just focus on brands that are physical and not web-native, which probably constitute somewhere around 95% of the products we buy every day.

What’s the issue with online advertising that has rendered it ineffective at advertising’s most important job — building a major brand?

For years I fumbled around trying to answer this question but I’ve never really understood it. I have blamed an absence of creativity. I have blamed the fact that it’s mostly direct response style advertising, but I’ve never really evolved a comprehensive theory of what the problem is.

But someone else has. A while back I received an email from Richard Shotton, a very smart guy and author of the wonderful book, The Choice Factory, directing me to a piece from 2014 called “Ads Don’t Work That Way” by a guy named Kevin Simler on a blog called Melting Asphalt. I’m going to do my best to summarize Simler’s argument, but reading the original is highly recommended as my interpretation of his argument is likely to be flawed at best.

Simler starts by quoting some standard explanations of how advertising works at building brands. Let’s borrow some terminology from subatomic physics and call these “standard models.” Here are some examples from standard models:

“An ad succeeds at making us feel something and that emotional response can have a profound effect on how we think and the choices we make”

Or

“By creating positive associations between the advertised products and feelings like love, happiness, safety, sexual confidence... these associations grow and deepen overtime making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and ultimately more likely to buy it“

Or

“advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action instead it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date.” In other words, “if Coke shows us enough images of people beaming with joy after drinking that product we’ll come to associate Coke with happiness and then sometime later will be more likely to purchase coke"

Simler is not happy with these explanations. He says it portrays us as far less rational than we actually are. “While we may not conform to a model of perfect economic behavior, neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom Dick and Harry with a billboard. We aren’t that easily manipulated.”

Instead he offers an alternative to the standard models that he calls "cultural imprinting.” Don’t be turned off by the awkward terminology. The theory underpinning his cultural imprinting idea is that in some way we all want to be part of what is culturally acceptable.

As he says, brand images are "part of the cultural landscape we inhabit. They provide cultural information. When we ignore brand messages we’re missing out on valuable cultural information and alienating ourselves from the Zeitgeist." He says this puts us in danger of becoming outdated, unfashionable, or otherwise socially hapless. We become like "the kid who wears his dad’s suit to his first middle school dance." In other words, in some way brand choices send messages to others about who we are. And no one wants to send the wrong messages.

This is not new thinking. When I first started working in the advertising business 1,000 years ago we used to call products that were most responsive to advertising “necktie products” -- products that are used or consumed in public and are plainly visible to others. Why are products like beer and soda and cars so responsive to advertising? Because these products are used in public and are highly visible. Whether we care to admit it or not, those of us who are not sociopaths prefer to be socially acceptable among our group.

So what does all this have to do with the online advertising problem? Here is the connection I’ve been missing. In Simler's words “cultural imprinting relies on the principle of common knowledge. For a fact to be common knowledge among the group, it’s not enough for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it.”

In other words, part of our purchasing calculation is not just our belief that X is an acceptable product, but our expectation that other people believe this brand is acceptable because they know what we know.

Here is an example he uses to describe purchasing behavior using the standard model…

We see a Nike ad that makes an association between Nike and athletic excellence. Over time we internalize this association and feel good about Nike, and when it comes time to buy some sneakers at some later date we are more likely to buy Nikes.

In the cultural imprinting model it starts the same…

We see a Nike ad that makes an association between Nike and athletic excellence.

But here’s what’s different. Over time we understand that everyone else has seen Nike ads and they also associate Nike with athletic excellence. So at some later date when we buy a pair of Nikes we don't have to worry that our group will think we're idiots.

Of course, this does not guarantee we will buy Nikes, but it makes the likelihood greater. And as I have written ad nauseum, marketing is about one thing only -- likelihoods and probabilities.

For advertising to be effective in the "cultural imprinting" model, it’s not enough for it to be seen by a single person or even by many people. Someone has to know that everyone else has seen it, too.

This may very well be why online ads have been largely ineffective at brand building. In the online world, everyone lives in his or her own little digi-world. I have no idea what my friends are doing online and what ads they may be seeing. Even if they watch the same YouTube videos as me, I don't know what ads they are being served.

In mass media, I know what my friends are seeing. I know that if they’re watching football they’re seeing the same ads I am. Consequently I have reasonable confidence that my friends believe that Nike makes acceptable running shoes, Ford makes acceptable pick-up trucks, and Coors makes beer I don’t have to feel weird about.

But I have no idea what my friends are seeing online. Even if they go to the same sites I do, I have no idea what ads they are seeing. Consequently, I have no frame of reference for “cultural imprinting.” I don’t know if they will think me an idiot for buying these headphones I saw on Whatever-dot-com.

In a nutshell, this may very well be why thus far mass-market advertising is demonstrably more effective at brand building than precision targeted, highly individualized advertising.

Highly individualized, personalized advertising -- the obsession of online advertisers -- makes advertising a private, rather than public, experience. It keeps us from knowing what advertising our friends are seeing. Which in some way keeps us from knowing what brands may be culturally acceptable.

For years I’ve known that online advertising has been mysteriously ineffective at brand building and now I think I finally understand why. By the way, Kevin Simler, the person who connected the dots for me, isn’t a marketing or advertising person — he’s a tech guy. But I believe he understands marketing better than most of the so-called professionals.

If he's right, the current obsession of advertisers to make their advertising perfectly individualized and perfectly personalized may be perfectly wrong.

(There is probably not a singular reason for the phenomenon of online advertising not having built major consumer-facing brands. But if you combine Simler's "cultural imprinting" hypothesis with the "signaling" hypothesis, I think you have a pretty good explanation.)

November 20, 2018

Over the years this blog has written a lot of nasty things about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. As the world is coming to realize what a toxic pile of crap Facebook is, I thought we'd collect some of our favorites in one place.

"It's very simple. Facebook is way too powerful to be run by a jerk like Mark Zuckerberg. He has... shown himself to be utterly
inadequate to handle the responsibilities of managing an organization
with the power and influence of Facebook. Or even understanding what the
responsibilities are."

On leadership...

"The absence of probity and maturity that Facebook has displayed has been
baked into the company's DNA by Zuckerberg's arrogance, and will remain
there as long as his vapid philosophies define their culture... "Young people are just smarter" "Move fast and break things"
This is the credo of an infantile egotist. You can draw a straight line from this nonsense to the current headlines."

"Zuckerberg will be strung up for ignoring the privacy rights of hundreds
of millions of people by clowns who have been ignoring the privacy
rights of hundreds of millions of people. There's no one to root for in
this cage match."

"It becomes harder and harder to overstate the corruption and treachery of the online ad industry. Lord knows I've tried...Facebook has become famous for its lunatic metrics and bizarre rationalizations...This week it was reported that Facebook was claiming to reach 41 million Americans between the ages of 18-24...There are only 31 million of them."

One good thing about Facebook - their duplicity is so transparent that anyone who claims he "didn't know" has to be an idiot....After Zuckerberg promised our bewildered representatives in Washington
two weeks ago that Facebook would abide by the "spirit" of the GDPR
privacy regulations...
this week Facebook moved 1.5 billion accounts out of Europe to the US to avoid the consequences of those regulations.

On surveillance...

FB maintains the right to collect your phone number and other information
about you when anyone, including people you don't know, upload their contacts that may include you.

Even when you turn off location services, FB tracks your location through Wi-Fi access points, cell towers and IP addresses.

You probably think FB is collecting data about you from the device you're using. Silly you. If you are anywherenearany other devices on your network they are collecting info from those devices as well. It's magic!

FB tracks you through
third parties whether or not you are logged into Facebook.

And the pièce de résistance -- Facebook's new data policy asserts that they track you even if you don't have a Facebook account.

On transparency...

FB's terms of service and privacy policies
are longer than the US Constitution...this week they increased the language of their data policy by
55%, you know, just to make things more convenient for us.

You Are Caller Number...

Click Image

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."